Beacon Street Diary

Archives: February 2017

The Congregational Library & Archives will be closed on Monday, February 20th in observance of Presidents' Day.

All of our online resources will be available as usual. If you have questions you would like to ask the staff, please send an email or leave a voicemail, and we'll get back to you when we return to the office on Tuesday.

In 1818, William Goodell (the missionary) introduced his relative, Lucy Goodale to his college friend Asa Thurston. Lucy Goodale and Asa Thurston were two of the earliest American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions' missionaries in Hawai'i. Over the course of the 19th century, the missionaries in Hawai'i invested heavily in sugar plantations and helped take over the islands including the coup that overthrew Queen Lili'uokalani. They eventually led the movement for U.S. annexation of the island nation.

Over the past decade, the study of missionaries from the United States has grown in leaps and bounds. Much of this work presumes that missionaries were always outsiders to the societies they evangelized however their children often grew up speaking local languages without a trace of an accent, and seeing the world through local lenses. This process of acculturation signals that the work of conversion was often a two-way street, and that the experience of living abroad for several generations profoundly shaped communities of missionaries.

In the Middle East, the American missionaries become involved in activities later associated with the Peace Corps, from building schools to carrying out famine relief. In Hawai'i, the American missionaries were involved in the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani and the annexation of the islands to the United States. Finally, in the south of the United States, in the aftermath of the Civil War, missionaries built most of the historically black colleges and struggled against the racism of Jim Crow.

Miller's current research (including sources from the Congregational Library & Archives) brings these strands of missionary history together in the broader framework of world history. Research for his second book follows the story of a single missionary family, the Goodell or Goodale, across three generations from New England to the Ottoman Empire, Appalachian Mountains and Hawai'i.

image of Kailua Church, an excerpt from "The King's Country Seat, and Church at Kailua", frontispiece of Scenes in the Hawaiian Islands and California (1865) by Mary Evarts Anderson, via Wikimedia Commons

Due to the continuing severe winter weather and the city of Boston's recommendation, our reading room will be closed on Monday, February 13th.

All of our online resources will be available as usual. If you have a question you'd like to ask the staff, send an us email or leave a voicemail, and we'll get back to you when we return to the office on Tuesday, February 14th.

Due to the impending severe snowstorm, our reading room will be closed on Thursday, February 9th.

All of our online resources will be available as usual. If you have a question you'd like to ask the staff, send an us email or leave a voicemail, and we'll get back to you when we return to the office on Friday, February 10th.

We are pleased to announce the the availability of three new collections in our New England's Hidden Histories program. Although they come from some of the oldest churches in Massachusetts, their earliest records have been lost. Our hope is that this program and others like it will help prevent further such losses, as well as making the information contained in these manuscripts available and accessible to all who might want them.

This collection contains the earliest surviving records from First Parish in Ipswich, Mass. The church was originally formed and built its first meetinghouse in 1634 after the town was incorporated. The three volumes available here include records pertaining to the church and its surrounding parish on subjects such as administrative and financial matters, membership information, and singing as part of worship.

These are the records from the South Parish in Ipswich, Mass. The congregation separated from First Church in 1747 and remained its own entity for 175 years until 1922 when the two rejoined. The two volumes contain records concerning both the church and its surrounding parish, including matters of administration, finance, and membership, as well as a brief history of the church.

First Church in Newton, Mass. was originally established as the First Church of Cambridge Village in 1664. The village seceded to become the city of Newton in 1688. The CLA received all of Newton First Church's historical records when the church closed in 1972, but now some of the earliest books in that collection are part of our New England's Hidden Histories program. These two volumes contain the earliest surviving records relating to church administration, membership, and finances.